


dissonant choruses

by astraielle, ghoulaesthetics (astraielle)



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Angst, Cardassian tails, Character Study, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Introspection, Past Abuse, Ziyal gets character development, it's light but it's there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2020-06-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:48:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24602632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astraielle/pseuds/astraielle, https://archiveofourown.org/users/astraielle/pseuds/ghoulaesthetics
Summary: She belongs here, and she doesn’t. She belongs on Cardassia, and she doesn’t. She’s not sure which side of this argument is winning, or even what the argument is at this point.The Breen camp was awful. She still has nightmares sometimes. Other times, she can’t even sleep because of the panic that grips her bones. The gashes on her arms and back and thighs have long since healed, but she could scarcely feel a touch across some of them. And yet, it was predictable. No internal conflicts to speak of--just work, and envisioning the day when her Father would finally come riding in to save her. It was simple, and in a very strange way, she missed that.She wonders if that means something else inside her is broken. Or if it was even whole to start with.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 19





	dissonant choruses

**Author's Note:**

> flower prompts: umbrella sedge, meaning "home." 
> 
> got a bit away from me whoops oh well here we are. also speaking as an art school drop out, the amount of crying and self-hatred one experiences trying to get their degree? fucking unparalleled. no wonder i latched onto ziyal lmao.
> 
> done in one day & unbeta'd save for some self-edits. enjoy.

Her body feels too wrong contained between these walls. 

Bajor is... lovely. Of course it is. The University campus is lovely too, and she’s never not going to be grateful to Kira for pulling some strings to get her enrolled. 

She needs to focus. Ziyal is doing fantastically in her classes, all things considered. There’s something life-affirming about creating the brushstrokes on a canvas and bringing an image to fruition. It’s much more fulfilling than anything she ever did in the Breen camp. 

Then again, that bar was so low, it might as well have been subterranean. 

The night air through her bedroom window carries in a floral scent on the warm air. The people responsible for the maintenance of the university grounds--dormitories included--seemed to be awful fond of gardens. She hadn’t taken the time to learn any of the proper names for them beyond ‘the purple ones,’ ‘the yellow ones,’ and so on. 

Well. She wasn’t studying to be a botanist. Who needed specifics, anyway?

She inhales the outside air again, exhaling out in a heaving sigh. 

The assignment parameters are so straightforward. Self-portrait, done from a mirror, not a still image. Paint was a necessity, but the type of paint used was up to the students. Ziyal likes oils. Likes the way that she can build colour with them and mix tones right on the image instead of just on the palette. She’s good with them too, though her other works have been of _other_ people, not herself. Inanimate objects too, but a still life wasn’t the same process as a portrait in her mind. The differences between a face and a bowl of fruit were too vast for them to be in the same category. 

She knows what she has to do. The thin wooden board she’s selected to work on has been prepared properly to receive pigment. She’s got a sketch to paint on top of already mapped out. It doesn’t look like her, at least, not without the colour. She’s not really sure who she’s drawn. 

The sketch on the board looks too relaxed and content to be the same person that’s staring her down in the mirror. 

The woman in the mirror sits hunched up on her floor, tail resting tensely at her feet, materials lined up almost distressingly neat around her--she’s organized and reorganized them too many times to count, while her fingers insisted on being unable to grasp her brush. Tubes of paint arranged in a spectrum. Solvents for thinning lined up by size. brushes categorized by bristle type, shape, and brand. Too organized to be of any use to her. 

She couldn’t find a smaller mirror than the floor-length one she sat before, and she wonders if any of her classmates or teachers will find it strange that she elected to paint her entire body, contorted as it was on her floor in the middle of her supplies rather than just a face. It was so much more work than was needed, so much more time that she could’ve been spending on other things. But really, what was she supposed to do if not throw herself into her work? 

Bajor was lovely. So was the university. The students... make their attempts at being the same. They’re far from unkind. But she can’t blame them for conveniently forgetting that she exists outside of class, either. She’s as much Bajoran as she is Cardassian, but the portion of her DNA that controlled appearance leaned hard to the latter. Spotting the ridges across the bridge of her nose required someone to get close enough to notice. 

It’s not just that, though. If that’s all it was, it might’ve been almost unnoticeable to her. She was far from the only child born of two worlds during the occupation, and by and large, Bajor seemed to be more relaxed about hosting people like that. Not necessarily happy about it, but they also didn’t seem to hold blame for people who had no control of their parentage. 

(Cardassia was--well. _Cardassia_. Her father had tried to shield her from the worst of it, but unfortunately for him, her hearing wasn’t as poor as it would have been without a Bajoran mother. And unlike on Bajor, they didn’t seem to have any reservations about voicing their opinions within earshot.) 

Ziyal gets the sense that she would’ve felt that disconnect with her classmates regardless of how she looked. She was Dukat’s illegitimate daughter, yet her formative years were nearly all spent on the run with Naprem. And then once that was done, she spent her days under the watchful eyes (eye-singular? Sensors? Feelers? All that time with them and she still had no idea what the Breen looked like. She would be happy never to find out) of her captors, surviving on the memory of her mother’s stories and the ghost of her father’s promises.

A tiny part of herself wondered if he ever really said that he would come back for her, or if that was more of her mother trying her best in their situation. 

She carried scars from that time. For some, clothing was enough to hide them. Others required something akin to acting. She didn’t see the point in cosmetic adjustments if the inside was just the same. 

She looks tired, she thinks. The bags under her eyes are a dead giveaway. So is her hair, loose and mussed up from running her hands through it. The part of her that’s been trained to be aware of aesthetics picks up on the fact that she would make a rather poetically depressing figure right now, were the brush in someone else’s hands instead of her own. She toyed with the idea of posing nude for the piece, but ultimately decided against it. Loose shorts and a tank top made up her outfit when she wasn’t concerned about public presentation, and it was as much skin as she was comfortable showing to her classmates. 

(If she really craved shock value, she would’ve ignored her face entirely and painted herself from the back. The Breen were merciful captors insofar as they wanted you alive and able to work, but that didn’t mean they were above striking their workers with whatever they pleased, and they certainly weren’t too concerned if they left a mark or two in the process. The scars on her back seemed to create a gruesome sort of roadmap between the scales. Her body could be quite a dramatic visual, if she wanted it to be.) 

_(Do I want it to be?)_

Her fingers twitch next to a dry palette. Her tail flicks anxiously of its own volition. She locks eyes with her reflection. She wonders just what it is about Cardassian genetics that cause them to announce themselves so clearly on her face. Her ridges are a bit smoother than they would be otherwise, and when she flushes it’s not just allocated to the scales along her neck, but to her cheeks as well. The eyes, though. Hers belonged in a Cardassian landscape and nowhere else. Slit pupils and a darkened sclera looking vacant and sleepless, unsure of wanting to look but unwilling to look away. 

_Pick up the brush and start_.

Easy. It was so easy. Her brain repeated the instruction over and over again. Just start. Just paint. She didn’t even have to consider composition.

_Just paint what you see._

_Paint what you see._

_What do I see?_

Maybe it was because this wasn’t truly her room. Well, it was. Kind of. She lived here. Many other students also lived here. Two bedrooms to a dorm, a kitchenette, and a washroom. Enough to live comfortably in, and enough that most other people did consider this their home even if they were only there for a few months at a time. She couldn’t. For whatever reason, she couldn’t bring herself to relax here. Kira had made sure she had access to whatever she needed or wanted--within reason, of course. Potted plants and a new bedspread didn’t help her feel any more like she was supposed to be here. 

Her room with her father on Cardassia had been colder than this one. The shapes were harder. The sheets felt unpleasantly alien, too silky to the touch to be comfortable. Her father said that he picked the decor out himself. She wasn’t so sure she believed that, but he seemed pleased with himself regardless of the truth. She never had the heart to tell him that the size of it left her feeling uncomfortably exposed and unable to sleep most nights. 

She didn’t have the heart to tell Kira that she spent too much time tossing and turning here either. She sat on the floor, now hugging her knees to her chest. The sketch of the face on the board matched the planes of her face. But it wasn’t her. The likeness was off. Just like the studies in her sketchbook had been. 

People assumed that she had an equal attachment to both halves of her homeworlds. Maybe there was some truth to that. She felt just as out of place on one as she did the other. Ziyal didn’t know if she preferred the open disdain of Cardassia, or the uncomfortable smiles and forced eye contact of Bajor. 

She missed Deep Space 9. The realization hits her with a snap, but on some level, she knows that it’s been bubbling under the surface for weeks. Deep Space 9 was wonderfully strange, and exciting, and dangerous, and a plethora of other things happening all at the same time. It was the sole time in her life, outside of when she existed with her mother, that she felt as though she could breathe freely. Life on the station moved at a chaotic pace, and she was just another face amongst the travellers that came and went. Maybe her room there hadn’t had a bed as soft as this one, but it had been comfortable to her. 

She frowned. The ghost of a placid smile on the sketch didn’t mirror it. 

She could call Kira. She had that permission. But Kira was probably busy around this time. Not that she knew what time it was back on the station, but it was a safe guess if nothing else. And she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to watch Kira attempt to lift her spirits, especially considering she didn’t even know what was wrong. She couldn’t start her painting. It was procrastination. That was it. And avoiding schoolwork wasn’t a reason to be experiencing the disconnect she felt between her face and the dormitory walls surrounding her. 

She would not call her father. Ziyal wanted to believe that he was a good man. That he had enough depth to be capable of understanding. But their last conversation left a bitter taste in her mouth, and she didn’t think she could stand to ignore it for anything more comprehensive than small talk. 

Would Garak understand? Perhaps. But that was strange, uncharted territory for her to get into with him. He knew what it was to long for a home he loved, for a place that was so familiar to him its very essence seemed to run through his veins. 

What Ziyal longed for was for something that didn’t even exist yet. The sketch of herself looked as untethered as she felt. Deep Space 9 was about as close as it got for her. And Deep Space 9 was practically a prison for Garak. It wasn’t that he forgot she was Bajoran, but she suspected that it was something he didn’t quite know how to get a proper handle on. Or maybe he simply got too sentimental about things that reminded him of his home, and no doubt the presence of another friendly Cardassian was enough to trigger that. 

She rested her chin on her knees, still frowning. This painting wasn’t supposed to be handed in for another two weeks. Not getting any further than this tonight wasn’t going to kill her. But she was already sitting here and already set up. Also, she’d used her desk lamp as a light source, and there was no moving that until she was finished with this. Getting it back to where it was before was an unspeakable pain in the ass. The sooner she wrapped up the painting, the sooner she could use it again. 

With a huff, she rose. She twists her spine a few times, trying to crack out a bit of the tension that sitting hunched over for so long caused. Her tail goes along with it, twisting this way and that, careful not to knock anything over. While rolling her shoulders, she eyed the padd sitting on her desk. Then she went back to the scene on her floor. 

She liked to get messy when she worked, purely because she was _allowed_ to and no one slapped her hand for it. She was allowed to make that mess and then clean it all up the way she liked it. Small things like that were considered borderline luxurious at this point. The fact that she had tried so hard to do the exact opposite here was telling. 

Her body ached, both from stress and from sitting so long on the hard floor. Her eyes felt dry. Her hair was a mess. Her paint remained stubbornly in the tubes. Perhaps she’d made a mistake earlier, getting all of her art history readings done during the daylight. Maybe she would have worked better during the day. It was like that, sometimes. 

She paces for a moment in a tight circle, careful of her steps. One of Ziyal’s arms is wrapped around her ribcage. The other elbow rests on it, and she finds herself chewing at the dry skin around her thumb nail. Nasty habit, that, but it wasn’t too bad given that her hands were currently free of any paint or solvents.

_Because you haven’t worked on anything all day. Just do it! I have what I need, I’m ready to go, so why..?_

“Ugh!” 

Flopping backwards onto the mattress produced the first vocalization she had made for at least 12 hours. She stared at the ceiling for a moment, tracing invisible shapes with her eyes. It was plaster. New plaster, because this building had been renovated and repaired in the last five years, along with the entire campus. 

_Because of men like Father_ , a quiet, accusatory voice piped up in her head. _Because someone tried to rip anything of value up from this planet for no reason aside from the fact that they had the power to do it, and they did. And Father wonders why they couldn’t throw in a token of gratitude for him while they rebuilt. And now you’re here, and you can’t even pick up the brush._

She rolls over onto her side and grabs a pillow. Maybe if she hides her face in it long enough, it’ll drown out that line of thought for good. It never did anything for her, aside from make something clench in her gut that she didn’t have a name for. 

She’s glad that no one, save for maybe the University Dean, knows about her parentage. She’s glad that she has her mother’s name to hide behind. 

She belongs here, and she doesn’t. She belongs on Cardassia, and she doesn’t. She’s not sure which side of this argument is winning, or even what the argument is at this point. 

The Breen camp was awful. She still has nightmares sometimes. Other times, she can’t even sleep because of the panic that grips her bones. The gashes on her arms and back and thighs have long since healed, but she could scarcely feel a touch across some of them. And yet, it was predictable. No internal conflicts to speak of--just work, and envisioning the day when her Father would finally come riding in to save her. It was simple, and in a very strange way, she missed that. 

She wonders if that means something else inside her is broken. Or if it was even whole to start with. 

_I could sleep just fine there_ , she thinks, and immediately hates herself for it. 

(Never mind the fact that that was likely due to the fact that she would spend the day on her feet and hauling stones for twelve hours at a time. She still felt betrayed by her inner dialogue.) 

She misses _home_. Her chest aches, and she digs her nails into the pillow harder, threatening the integrity of the fabric. She misses home, and then another wave of hurt rolls through her as she realizes she doesn’t even know what that means. She misses something that doesn’t exist, and somehow, missing a concept is even worse. 

She’s not going to cry now. She isn’t. Because really, there’s nothing wrong--she’s happy and safe, right? Doing something productive with her hands, tapping into her passion? Creating something worthwhile? She should be fine. There’s no need for her throat to burn like this. None. 

It’s just a self-portrait. 

Just a painting. 

Just a reflection of herself. Who she was. Hair. Ridges. Eyes. Nose. Tail. Scars. Scales. 

_Huh._

Perhaps that was the problem. Ziyal had never given much thought to the sort of person she was--there was never any _time_ to consider it. And then when she had a chance to do so, the rest of the universe seemed to have already decided for her. 

Kira had called her strong. She didn’t feel that way. If she was, she wouldn’t have been so easily torn and tossed around. 

Home was an abstract concept that didn’t exist and a knife in her chest at the same time. She felt instinctively like she would be disappointing both her Father and Kira right now for different reasons. 

She would _not_ cry. 

She curls tighter around the pillow and grips it with everything she has. 

“You’re _fine_ ,” she whispers hoarsely, half-scolding. She has work to do. She doesn’t want to be doing this. 

She thinks that it’s a little funny, the fact that she spent so long with her life in danger, only shedding tears when the reaction to physical pain was too strong to push through. And now? Now that she was safe on Bajor, any threat to her safety lightyears away, the layers of armour and scar tissue were being pulled back. 

This wasn’t the first time she had felt this way. It probably wouldn’t be the last. 

Ziyal feels raw as she bites her lower lip, hard enough to break skin, because she needs to blame something on the saltwater that’s started to dampen the pillowcase. 

A part of her longs for her Father. His reassuring words and solid presence. She feels that she doesn’t have a right to that, not with all the pain that he’s caused. And deeper than that, it makes her feel as though she’s not allowed to be like _this_. Tora Ziyal isn’t allowed to hurt, alone and safe in her bedroom, not when she’s the product of someone responsible for so much suffering. Probably the suffering of some of her professors and classmates too. Maybe that’s why she can’t bring herself to feel anything more than resigned rejection when she doesn’t get invited anywhere with them after class, or no one saves a place for her at the life drawing studio. 

_I deserve this_ , one half of her says. 

_No, I don’t,_ the other fights. _For what? The horrible crime of being born? Please. Deserving implies that you actually have anything to feel this way about. You don’t. You’re fine. Get **up**. _

No part of herself was intent on being kind tonight, evidently. 

She doesn’t move. It’s been a while since she’s had a good cry, but that doesn’t mean she forgot how to cry silently. Her whimpers are low and wounded. Instead of the heaving breaths she wants to take, her entire body trembles from head to tail. She feels fragile, like she might shatter. 

She’s cried more times than she can count on Bajor. 

She had her first of many panic attacks on Cardassia.

She never felt this way at the Breen camp. 

She wants to scream at that moment, and refrains only for the fact that she doesn’t know if her roommate is home or not. A Bajoran girl (obviously), who made polite small talk with Ziyal if they crossed paths but otherwise averted her eyes as if she was frightened. The last thing she needed was to expose the poor girl to this side of herself. She’s making soft keening noises, the kind of sounds you’d expect from someone desperately in search of any source of comfort. 

Time passes. Ziyal stays put and allows herself to experience the ocean of despair that she can’t seem to find a way out of. It wasn’t necessarily that no one was tossing her a life preserver, either. More like they insisted on tossing her things that had no use to her, like a raft that hadn’t yet been inflated. Just enough to slow the drowning, not stop it completely. 

Half an hour later and she’s still whimpering, but the worst of it has passed. She feels shaky, raw, wrung-out and no closer to starting her portrait. She forces herself into a sitting position, slouching as she presses the heels of her hands into her eyes and tries to rub the last drops of sadness out of herself. In reality, she’s just managed to lock the rest of it back up inside, tucked away for the next time she attempts to work on this project. Or maybe the next time it starts leaking through again, it’ll be something entirely different to trigger it. Who knew? Certainly not Ziyal.

Legs dangling over the edge of the bed, she feels her eyes beginning to lose focus and her mind go disconcertingly quiet. The shaky feeling in her body threatened to tear her away entirely. She fought it, trying to guess what the flowers in the garden were called.

It was nice, being able to smell flowers like this. They're sweet, and promise happier things. Things that aren't nameless hurts. Things that she feels as though she can claim. 

If nothing else, she decides, wherever in the universe home ends up being, wherever she finds that she feels she belongs--she’ll have flowers. 


End file.
